When the Cooler Master HAF XB was reviewed I knew there and then it was destined to stay for a while here at pcGameware. It’s such an easy case to work with and offers easy accessibility due to its desktop design. It also sports a couple of hot swap drive bays making our lives even easier. The perfect case for what we do on an almost daily basis. It’s also not a test bench (per se), it’s not open to air so the thermal data we get during testing is a little more real world.

Nowadays power consumption for PCs, even Gaming PCs seems to be on the decline, so we use a relatively moderate power supply. The Corsair AX 760i, covers us for most of our testing needs and even with SLI and Crossfire setups we don’t see power consumption above 600 watts. Of course it’s also made by what I consider to be the best PSU manufacturer out there, ensuring that we have the utmost in reliability and stability.

We’ve been using the ASRock Fatal1ty Z97X Killer for almost a year and have had great success and stability throughout that time. When it came to upgrading our test system so we could utilise Intel#s latest Skylake CPU (and after the recent review), the ASRock Fatal1ty Z170 GAMING K6 was the obvious choice!

Every year we upgrade our test equipment and this years natural new CPU choice was Intel’s Core i5-6600K. There’s no doubt in our minds here at pcG that this CPU offer the current best bang for your buck when it comes to Gaming!

Utilising the built in overclocking Profiles aboard the ASRock Fatal1ty Z170 GAMING K6 allows us to run this CPU at 4.4GHz, this overclock will be used throughout all of our testing.

After recently reviewing the impressive Noctua NH-U12S we felt that due to its easy to use mounting system and the great performance it offered, the Noctua NH-U12S would be the natural choice to cool our overclocked Intel Core i5-6600K.

To compliment our ASRock Fatal1ty Z170 GAMING K6 and our Intel Core i5-6600K, we opted this time around to go for 16GB of RAM (DDR4 2400MHz) courtesy of the G.Skill Ripjaws 4. This kit comprises of x4 4GB modules running at an overclocked 2400MHz.

SSDs may offer great performance but unfortunately this comes at a cost, and with Steam collections often over 1TB SSD’s are no longer practical. So the HDD still has a place in a Gaming Rig then? Well no! Here at pcG we’d advise you to use a Hybrid Drive or SSHD such as the Seagate 2TB SSHD, great capacity and 100% faster than a HDD! 😉

After a year with AMD it was time for us to give the green team a chance. This time around we will be using one of Nvidia’s finest in the form of an EVGA 980Ti Classified. This card sports a high factory overclock and can get a little toasty if not kept cool. Perfect for our case testing…

Although you don’t need a dedicated soundcard for Gaming, as nowadays on-board sound is actually pretty good, we use one to help us in our headset testing. There’s no point in pairing up a £200 headset with on-board sound after all. To this end when testing regular analogue headsets over £100 we break out the Creative Sound Blaster Zx.